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For a long time, I haven't been able to upgrade the icehousegames.org wiki software, due to some corruption in the database. This has meant that as my web host upgraded PHP, the very outdated version…Continue

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I've been a fan of Looney Labs games for more than five years, and I've played every game of theirs I could get my hands on, as well as having run demos at local stores and conventions.

HOW DID YOU LEARN ABOUT LOONEY LABS?

I'm a computer programmer, longtime gamer, and dabble in many more hobbies like the SCA, juggling, cooking, brewing, archery, mathematics, linguistics, and more.

LOONEY LABS GAMES I PLAY/PROMOTE:

Fluxx, Looney Pyramids, Time Travel Games, Aquarius, Are You a Werewolf?, Are You The Traitor?

Starship Captain List

Zendo — A beautiful, elegant, engaging, deep game. This was what got me started on Icehouse games, and now I'm hooked. I love being either a master or a student; watching others trying to find the hidden pattern that only I know, or doing it myself, searching through mysterious structures made from brightly colored pyramids to find order within the chaos.

Homeworlds — A lovely abstract strategy game, which I think has the strongest theme of any of the Icehouse games. This game has a bit of a steep learning curve, as the strategies are subtle, but can be lots of fun.

Gnostica — The best strategic Icehouse game, in my opinion. This game has a lot going for it; tension, battles, a little luck with a lot of strategy, a great atmosphere, high player interaction, and so on. The main problems are that it's complex, and so can be hard to get people to learn it, and it can have some analysis paralysis, which can lead to it taking a while to play.

RAMbots — This game is just loads of fun. There's enough room for strategy to make it interesting and lend it some depth, but then there's the whole simultaneous movement aspect that can be great for you, or destroy your best laid plans.

Volcano — A set-collecting puzzle type game, and can be quite a brain burner. When played multiplayer, it has the problem that the person who does best is the person to the left of the worst player, instead of being the best player; I far prefer the two-player game.

IceTowers — A fun real-time Icehouse game, with a surprising amount of strategy for its simplicity. Great with Giant Icehouse pieces.

Alien City — Only ever played on Super Duper Games. The mechanic of having the road network emerge from the spaces in between the buildings is beautiful. A bit prone to analysis paralysis, since you can sit there calculating scores for different moves for a while. I need to get a Piecepack set so I can play this in person.

Pikemen — A nice chess-like game. The attacking/defending dichotomy is neat, and the game is simple and easy to learn.

Torpedo — A simple, quick to play, easy to teach, real time game. The main problem is that the "just play all of your pieces as fast as you can" strategy wins too often.

Blam! — This game has pretty good bang for your rules buck. The rules can be explained in a minute, and yet the game is surprisingly complex. It has a slight problem of being able to get into infinite loops easily, although I've found that it's usually possible for one of the players to break the loop.

Nothing Beats a Large — Interesting variant on Rock-Paper-Scissors, which actually adds some interesting strategy and turns it into a real game.

Treehouse — A nice filler, fairly quick and easy to set up and play, this has a large luck factor. For this type of game, I'd usually rather play Fluxx instead.

Brian Campbell's Event Reports

Arisia, January 14-17, was in a new hotel this year, the Westin Waterfront in Boston. After spending a few years in the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge, which was too small for Arisia, the Westin was a breath of fresh air. Instead of being crowded, small, and hot, the game room was large and spacious, with plenty of room, though a bit out of the way.

There were no formal demos scheduled for Looney Labs games, but I met with several other fans and we taught each other, and other…

Comment Wall (2 comments)

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Hi, Brian. I've been contributing to the IcehouseOrg wiki a lot lately, and those of us active there have gotten pretty concerned about the deluge of spam. I think everyone would be happier if you could throw the switch to make account approval a manual process -- even if there were a bottleneck that slowed new accounts down to a two-to-four week lag time or the like. There's no way that manually approving accounts could be more work than the spam cleanup that the current system demands. (Captcha, alas, is only an annoyance for human editors at this point.)